I’ve ported software before, admittedly mostly between languages and tools on the same platform although there was that time I ported an application from a DEC VAX to Windows – that was fun. Anyhow what I hadn’t done before was use CygWin to build an application, however that was my plan for today. My intention was to build the only tool I’ve so far found which understands Acorn Archimedes Soundtracker and Digital Symphony files which is called XMP. I went around in circles several very frustrating times until I realised that my path was a little polluted and contained 2 installs of GNU C++ which wasn’t helping. Eventually, and after working through several more configuration screw-ups I finally had an executable.
Having thrown every Archimedes era music file I could find at it, it played them all. I was jolly pleased, but this was only part one of the job. Next I wanted to persuade the Winamp plugin to build; this it turned out was a lot more troublesome. I tinkered with makefiles until I finally got the damn thing built. But then Winamp simply failed to start using my newly built plugin; something was clearly wrong.
I made a giant mug of tea and mulled over the problem; opting to accompany that with a rather tasty (if I do say so myself) chocolate muffin. Perhaps being on the bleeding edge was my problem here, so I downloaded at earlier version of the software which came both helpfully and equally irritatingly with an already built DLL. Slightly reluctantly I tried this with Winamp and it worked perfectly. I could now enjoy my old-skool music collection on current hardware and even convert them to a more portable format.
But damn that wasn’t the point, I didn’t want to use someone else’s build I wanted my own. Perhaps an alternate toolset might help. I’ll trying building with WinGW instead. After waiting a few minutes for a multitude of components to download I finally had a working environment. Would you know it, it worked first time. I now had a DLL build from the latest version of the source which worked flawlessly.
So while it took much longer than it should have, it was a useful learning exercise and more importantly I can now play all that delightful retro plinky plonky synthesised music from the lazy hazy Acorn filled summers of my youth.